Claromentis Intranet Software Blog

After applying permission to a folder or document, have you ever wonder that you need to make sure the right person can view the document? Let’s say you added Group:Marketing, until now there is no to find out who are the member of “Group Marketing for instance” unless you have to navigate away to ‘People’ application and run a search or filter.

But now in 5.6.1 we’ve got a nifty solution. It’s called “View effective permission”, as you can see you can now review the permission on every single permission dialog box to make sure the right people has the right permission.

Clients, Communities and Case studies, Design and User Interface, General Intranet Posts, Intranet Development and API, Technical Support Claromentis, document management, intranet applications, update, user interface

It is always great when clients appreciate your work - but even more so when they send you a crate of Beer Lao to let you know!

Today Albany suprised us with exactly that to acknowledge the hard work the support team have put in recently for them, so thanks to Howard and the IT team at Albany, and here’s Julian about to consume the first one..

Cheers Albany!

Just don’t ask him for anything too technical later today!

Corporate News, General Intranet Posts, People and Cultural Issues, Services, Technical Support client appreciation, support

As you might noticed, Claromentis Intranet Manager uses BBCode in some of its applications such as Forum Post and News.

BBCode was devised to provide a safer, easier and more limited way of allowing users to format their messages. Programmer convenience was certainly another factor, as BBCode is very simple to implement.

Some implementations of BBCode have suffered problems mainly user interface, Intranet users have already become accustomed using WYSIWYG editor.

Claromentis 5.6 intruduces new way to handle with this situation from the programmer point of view there is no drawback, it is still an old BBCode but users get a WYSIWYG interface.

Check out our screenshot below:

Products, Technical Support Claromentis 5.6, Design, intranet news, technology, user interface

We all love intranets (at least in Claromentis). Intranets don’t just allow you to manage and organize your precious data in your corporation, but it also encourages your users to get involved in the workplace; if it is used correctly. In this article, I am going to list the 7 common mistakes that an intrananet administrator shouldn’t do. I hope this helps you optimize your intranet and make it work more efficiently for both you and your users.

Keep It Simple, Yet Efficient

We all are busy, aren’t we? Nobody wants to come to an office and see a load of irrelevant documents nagging them and announcements that they have no interest with. You wouldn’t want them to spend tens of minutes looking at a single page and assume them to find their way around.

It could be pretty painful for the end user if you keep your intranet’s user interface cluttered. Try to have a clean and well structured user interfaces; both on your internal pages and public pages.

Use Intranet Permissions, Groups and Roles

Most of our users have been enjoying the comfort and luxury of the extensive intranet permissions system of Claromentis. By using this powerful yet innovative feature of Claromentis Intranet Software, you can filter your documents, files, pages, announcements, news and almost everything else for your target audience. Our software allows you to keep your intranet elements well efficiently organized and gives your workforce a clean and well-thought environment to work on. By preventing them seeing the unnecessary elements of an intranet, they will be more likely to be focused on the actual work itself.

Do Not Assume Your Users Are Computer Literate

Try to be precise on your descriptions and guidelines, particularly if you are trying to explain a part of your intranet. Don’t assume them that clicking on the “Submit” button after filling all of the information is obvious. Write it down and make it clear every single step they should follow. If you are not lucky enough by not having a user friendly intranet software, well, change your provider if it is still not too late or push your service provider to provide you a better interface.

Encourage Your Users to Communicate

Most of the intranet software suites provide a functionality to enable your users to communicate each other, one way or another. Be it an instant messaging, e-mailing or forums; encourage your users to communicate each other. This will not only reduce the workload of your support team but your users will also pick things up quicker by trying themselves. If you have a collaborative intranet solution, then use the many of the features provided. Allow users to comment on your news, allow them to write blogs, certainly use forums for both personal and corporate matters.

Use Short, Precise Surveys

Every week or so, create a survey and try collecting an information from your users. With the advantage of a permission based intranet, you can have different surveys for different audiences all within the same intranet. Sometimes try to ask something about a national event or something out of a business matter. Don’t have long and boring surveys as most of the users will not bother filling the information correctly, if not at all.

Keep Your Language Simple and Easy to Understand

If your organization is big and have many levels of knowledge between the different areas of your intranet, try to keep your writing language simple and easy to understand. Use short and grammatically correct sentences. This especially applies to your news, announcements and e-mails sent to masses. If you are going to write about a very specific topic which will be interesting for only some of your departments, assign reading permissions to people who belong only those departments.

Try to be Innovative

It has always been encouraging for us to see some innovative uses of our intranet software by some of our clients. Don’t be afraid of expressing your ideas to your manager or your intranet software provider. In most cases, there is always a way to achieve what you are after and it is usually easier than you think.

What are your ways and best practises for improving your corporate intranet’s user experience? Share it with your comments.

General Intranet Posts, Technical Support, intranet applications intranet, intranet applications, intranet software, intranet software discussions

For those of you that don’t already know, LAMP is an acronym for Linux - Apache – MySQL - PHP. It’s a collection of software that can be used to run servers and dynamic websites. It’s one of the most popular alternatives to Microsoft, and according to statistics provided by netcraft.com not only is Apache holding around 60% market share in the delivery/presentation of websites, but it’s thriving on the open source platforms and continuing to grow and compete (successfully) against Microsoft. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that any piece of software that can even compete (let alone lead) in its market against a super company like Microsoft has to have something special about it. Well, it’s no secret why the LAMP solution is so popular, it just works, it works well, it’s reliable, it’s robust, it’s resilient, and it’s free.

Without going into all of the nitty-gritty debates about why you should and shouldn’t base a corporate solution on an open source platform (there are enough of these debates on the Internet already), it’s not hard to realize why Claromentis run all of their development on the LAMP platform. The LAMP platform allows the development team to manage all aspects of their programming environment without relying on Microsoft to ensure the stability of that environment. Depending on who you talk to, avoiding Microsoft can be complete suicide, or a dream come true. Personally, I’m a believer in the statistics, and if 60% of the websites are running on Apache, my money is on that platform to deliver the best of everything. And I’ve never met a PHP developer who programs on anything else.

However, Claromentis doesn’t believe in limitations, so we let you decide which platform you wish to run the applications on. The Claromentis framework is compatible with LAMP, Windows, and ORACLE, so it works the way you do, integrating easily with your existing IT infrastructure.

For more information about Claromentis and the platforms it can run on, please contact sales@claromentis.com or call us on 01273 666 355

Open Source Intranets, Services, Technical Support, intranet applications apache, LAMP, Linux, mysql, open source, php, platform, windows

If you didn’t know already, the Claromentis Infocapture application has the ability to extend it’s framework with the aid of plug-ins.  Plug-ins are add-ons to the application, allowing you to do almost anything with data that the application collects or manages.  You can use a plug-in to import data into the e-form automatically, export the data to 3rd party application/database or file, provide extended field verification and form checking, perform advanced calculations and data manipulation amongst an almost endless variety of other system process enhancing capabilities.

But the use of plugins doesn’t just stop there…

When you think about integrating the InfoCapture Application with another (or several) of the other applications within the Claromentis Framework, plug-ins step into a whole new league .

The InfoCapture Application can already integrate easily with Claromentis Sales Manager, to embed e-forms within pages about each company (to work in conjunction with Contact and Opportunity management), but combine that with InfoCapture plug-ins, and not only are you extending in the CRM system by intergrating with Infocapture, but you have the ability to extend it even further with the use of plug-ins.

I should also not fail to mention that InfoCapture and the Claromentis Document Manager application are also close friends, with linking to documents available within e-forms as standard(while still applying the correct document permissions!).

So where else can this go…

InfoCapture has envolved over the years to become such an adaptable data collection application, it could sit comfortably with so many of the Claromentis Applications.

You could use InfoCapture with other applications such as…

• Creating Special Calendar Events (Calendar)
• Booking meeting rooms (Room Booking)
• Booking holidays (Holiday Planner)
• Managing your email (Webmail)
• Managing your un-qualified sales leads (CRM)

The list could go on….

Imagine combining the Claromentis Project Manager Application with InfoCapture, and using plug-ins to extend the capabilities of them both.

The effectiveness of easily customizable and incredibly powerful e-forms solution combined with a project management application is a sure guarantee to gaining a decent ROI.  How many other project management applications allow such flexibility and extendability with the aid of an application like Claromentis InfoCapture and plug-ins?

So I ask the question again… how powerful are InfoCapute plug-ins??

And the answer appears to be… incredibly so….

Intranet Development and API, Products, Technical Support, intranet applications e-forms, extending, infocapture, plugins

When it comes to find the easiest solution to manage intranet and extranet content, Claromentis has some great nifty features for users on every level.

Today, almost all content management solutions offer you a WYSIWYG text based content editor, which means what you create on the editor section is what you will see on the actual page. Cool, but nothing special!

What makes Claromentis special is the way it interacts with your content. Let me explain you a bit further:

In Claromentis, it is possible to create templates and define editable areas. Let’s say you have a page which contains 3 sections; one for the menu, one for the main content and one for the links of websites you visit frequently. I also presume that you would like to have some images within your main content section.

With Claromentis easy-to-use content management software, you define the areas above and their field type. For consistency purposes, you wouldn’t want your intranet and/or users to change the overall look and feel of your template, so you wouldn’t want them to change the main title font size or colour. So you can define the header section of your main content area as ’string’, which means your users will only be able to change the content of the header section but not its styling.

You have your template ready and its sections defined. The next step is populating the actual content. How would you do this? Simple. Just look at the following picture and you will get the idea:

Easy to use content management solution

It is also possible to create areas within your template which are not editable by users. This could be a company slogan or a footer area which contains company address information.

Customizable Intranet Software: Works the way you do…

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